Voegelin on Aristotle’s “Science of the Polis”

Abstract

In his 1951 Walgreen lectures published as the New Science of Politics, Eric Voegelin calls for the restoration of political science as a science of order. This restoration is necessary because political science has fallen into a degenerate state as a Weberian, value-free social science concerned with “objective, value-free” measures of political phenomenon. Political science as a genuine science of order should be grounded on an interpretation of political societies’ symbols through which they interpret their connection to a transcendent truth. In the New Science of Politics, Voegelin both describes what would be necessary for a restoration of political science and models it in his analyses of contemporary political societies and the state of our understanding of the order of these societies. He describes his own method as “substantially the Aristotelian procedure” and reminds us that political science was initiated by Plato and Aristotle.